Tweaking excerpts

  • Resolved Tracy

    (@tracycoach)


    7 years, 8 months ago

    Hi Chris, I hope you’re well?

    I’m trying to get the excerpts to work in various views on my site, and am hitting a couple of snags/have a question.

    1. For that ‘front page’ view, I’ve enabled ‘read more’ links for both manual and automatic excerpts. For testimonials where I’ve set a manual excerpt, they show with two read more links. The first is underlined, the second isn’t; both link to a testimonial-type post. For testimonials where I haven’t set a manual excerpt, there’s only (correctly) one ‘read more’ link (not underlined). I can disable the ‘read more’ functionality and add it manually to the excerpt (see 3. below), but just wanted to let you know just in case it’s a bug.

    2. I’ve set the settings so that “If no manual excerpt, create an excerpt using custom length of the first 300 words” – but the max seems to be 81?

    3. For the individual testimonial posts/pages, there’s no testimonial title, client name or image – is that expected? If so, I can just add a ‘read more’ link manually into the text of the excerpt, to go off to the main (all) testimonials page instead. I’m wondering if there’s any way to anchor the link to an individual story on that page? E.g., the first testimonial on https://tracydempsey.co/success-stories uses 

    <h3 class=“testimonial-heading”>Finally doing what I’ve been wanting to do for a long time</h3>

    …could I use CSS to add the testimonial ID into that h3 element maybe, and then manually create an anchor link from its excerpt to its full-length version in the main testimonials page?

    Thanks!
    Tracy

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter Tracy

    (@tracycoach)

    PS Sorry, meant to include main link so you can see that ‘front page’ version: https://tracydempsey.co. Will put some screenshots on imgur too here.

    Thread Starter Tracy

    (@tracycoach)

    Screenshots here

    Plugin Contributor Chris Dillon

    (@cdillon27)

    Hi Tracy,

    Thank you for pointing this out and for the links and screenshots.

    Regarding points 1 and 2: The current read-more is the result of trying to integrate with themes and not reinvent the wheel but it’s obviously not working well.

    The obstacle is that the WordPress functions for trimming text and adding read-more links are meant for posts so the theme gets the last word. It’s no simple task to apply them selectively.

    While I think the custom length/read-more is more widely used, and therefore one might make the case for those being the only options, I want to maintain the default values for those who rely on it.

    So I will work on it and publish an update next week.

    Regarding point 3: That is your theme’s single post template so, again, it is in control.

    I have not found a way to hijack that template and I probably won’t as it’s an otherwise beneficial feature of the separation of plugins and themes.

    The simplest solution is to create a single testimonial template in your (child) theme and modify it. Every theme is different and that requires more coding skills than just a little CSS. I can walk you through it if you like.

    I will look into creating page anchors as you suggested.

    Ideally, the read-more would link to a page that mimics the single post template by displaying the individual testimonial using a plugin template while maintaining the permalink structure. That’s my goal.

    Chris

    Plugin Contributor Chris Dillon

    (@cdillon27)

    Excerpts now work better in version 2.26.

    https://strongplugins.com/strong-testimonials-2-26/

    I also added the option to link the title to the testimonial post. I am undecided about linking to a page anchor as it opens up multiple configuration issues. I will add it to the feature request list.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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